TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
Picture the last agonizing hours of a man wrongly condemned. The painful regrets over a promising career cut short; a final appeal for pardon, denied; the heart-wrenching letters to loved ones and friends, never to be seen again. From his solitary cell, a decorated U-boat captain pours the final expression of his torment into sketches of his impending death.
How could it come to this—that a talented and committed U-boat captain, having survived the horrors of submarine warfare, would meet an ignominious end at the hands of fellow men in uniform? The scapegoat of a perverted justice system, Oskar Kusch would go down in history as the only German U-boat captain to be executed for daring to speak out against Hitler and his regime.
Oskar-Heinz August Wilhelm Kusch, born on April 6, 1918, was the gifted only child of a wealthy family in Schöneberg, an upper-class neighborhood in southwestern Berlin. His father, Heinz—the director of a large insurance company—was a World War I veteran, but also a member of the Freemasons, whose secret rituals and freethinking traditions later drew reprisals from the Third Reich. An intelligent, sensitive youth with an athletic physique and a flair for water sports, Oskar enjoyed a liberal upbringing that shielded him from the worst excesses of Nazification after 1933.
The navy, in particular among the German armed forces, was considered a place where liberal ideas were tolerated.
As a boy, Kusch joined the , an alliance of youth groups inspired by the International Boy Scouts. His club embraced the teachings of classical art, literature, and philosophy, planting the seeds that would inform his refined views as an adult. In his teens, Kusch started showing what would become a lifelong tendency to thumb his nose at Nazi orthodoxy: after the Hitler Youth absorbed the in 1935, Kusch quit but continued to attend clandestine meetings of his old organization. This landed him on a register of “politically unreliable individuals” with the Gestapo, Germany’s notorious secret police. As a result,
